US needs more subs to counter China ...

[Stuart Mackey]

I think this might be the Chase Stuart had in mind

And it was an unarmed fisheries patrol ship, not navy and the South Africans caught them.

[K. A. Pital]

However, its not the relevent number. The relevent number is, if one or more of our ships weren't doing the job, how much would it cost the relevent country to do it?

No, that's irrelevant. You claimed that a direct comparison of military expenditure is not possible because the US spends more due to "global benefits" functions in which you listed oceanography etc.

What me and Surlethe are asking about is the relative size of that spending to the rest.

Because if you spend 10% of your military expenditure on that, you can't claim that these 10% are what makes your military spending "incomparable" to others, when the difference is a factor of ten or far greater.

[Darth Wong]

Probably the most striking example of this effect is GPS. We created GPS for purely military purposes, to navigate military assets and deliver munitions more accurately. GPS now has a vast horde of civilian applications that are becoming indispensible. If we decommissioned GPS, other nations would have to replace it if they want to maintain those services. (There are two GPS-like systems, GLONASS and Galileo but neither come close to GPS's overall value).

That is indeed a good example. But again, I think we have to question the size of the investment necessary for these kinds of projects if massive military interventionism was not occurring periodically. The fact that something was developed for military purposes does not necessarily mean it would not have been developed otherwise.

The U.S. spends about 80 percent of the world total military R&D as far as we know. Obviously an exact answer is pretty much impossible since highly classified R&D is, well, secret. Most of that feeds back to the civilian sector sooner or later, even the most esoteric usually finds an unexpected civilian application.

The same mechanism would occur with any kind of government-funded R&D, not just military. Really, I think that the inadvertent usefulness of military R&D is more of a testament to the importance of well-funded government R&D as a public-works project than the importance of the military.

In terms of pulling back into our shell and cutting the defense budget, I have a suspicion that we could cut a large portion of our defense budget without seriously cutting the research expenditures.

Lord yes. If we decided to pull back into our shell, we could scrap the CVN and SSN fleets, in fact we could scrap most of the US Navy. We could operate the army from fixed coastal and border bases, we could scrap the Air Force transort fleet, if the US went isolationist we could make major reductions in our force structure. That would involve slashing R&D because without the deployability concern, the need for R&D goes away. No need, no R&D. The point then becomes that a lot of things we do as a by-product of our worldwide deployment then will have to be taken up by other people. Will they do it? How much will they actually invest?

Given the hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, some of that could be plowed into R&D spending. For example, if that was poured into pharmaceutical and medical research or directly into better consumer automobiles, you could get the same bang for a lot fewer bucks.

[K. A. Pital]

The fact that something was developed for military purposes does not necessarily mean it would not have been developed otherwise.

Especially as other nations have now developed their own GPS-type systems, and they spend less on the military than the US.